


Then He's a Hot Knife

by tomato_greens



Series: Listen, Listen - music ficlets [23]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Background Character Death, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-17
Updated: 2012-12-17
Packaged: 2017-11-21 08:46:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/595781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles’s hair is longer, Derek thinks. His smile is a little crookeder, like he’s gotten used to––smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, or kissing goodbyes behind the ears of his conquests, drinking strong, blue-dark coffee from tiny cups and humming little-known love songs under square-pruned trees. <i>Something.</i> Derek doesn’t know: he’s never travelled so far.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Then He's a Hot Knife

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rlnerdgirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rlnerdgirl/gifts).



> Written for [rlnerdgrl](http://rlnerdgirl.tumblr.com) on [Tumblr](http://tomato-greens.tumblr.com/post/38133321470/fic-then-hes-a-hot-knife). Written to Fiona Apple's [Hot Knife](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5hO8UF9FJ4). For the prompt "Stiles goes abroad for a semester during college and comes back… different."

By the time they catch up to Stiles, it’s too late to help––he’s already the last one standing, bodies splayed out around him, broken, the expression on his face still fierce enough to be the white-hot center of an A-bomb. “Oh my god,” says Scott, and throws up.

-

Stiles’s hair is longer, Derek thinks. His smile is a little crookeder, like he’s gotten used to––smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, or kissing goodbyes behind the ears of his conquests, drinking strong, blue-dark coffee from tiny cups and humming little-known love songs under square-pruned trees. _Something_. Derek doesn’t know: he’s never travelled so far.

Stiles comes further out of the terminal, his eyes flicking back and forth over the crowd, too competently for it to be anxiety––searching, Derek thinks, for possible threats, the way Derek himself always does. It’s unnerving. Derek gives a little wave. 

“Oh, hi,” Stiles says, hitching his duffel bag further up on one shoulder. The suitcase he’s got trailing behind him isn’t as big as Derek remembers. “Thanks for picking me up. I thought––I don’t know, I thought I might have to rent a car or something when my dad told me he couldn’t come.”

Derek rolls his eyes extravagantly. “Pack,” he says, not because he’s trying to be frustrating or obscure or any of the millions of things Stiles has called him when he gives one-word answers but because it’s really the only explanation he can think of.

Stiles flinches almost imperceptibly. Derek wouldn’t have noticed, once, but he’s all charged up with missing Stiles, like a copper wire on the wrong end of a busted outlet; he reaches out without thinking, his hand on one of Stiles’s shoulders. His fingers are almost touching the hair that’s grown out on the back of Stiles’s neck. “You okay?” he asks, glancing over––and immediately lets go, Stiles’s expression too frozen to be anything but miserable.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Stiles says woodenly. “Come on. I want to go sleep in my own bed, finally.”

“Sure,” says Derek, feeling awkward and unsteady, unsure what else to do. “Sure.”

-

“What?” Stiles says, his arms crossed protectively over his stomach. “What, like you’ve never seen anyone kill people before?”

-

Stiles must have learnt the spells somewhere, but he’s clammed up about it: “It was this super hot Belgian girl named Dominique,” he says to Scott, but then turns around and tells Erica it was, “This old priest named, I kid you not, Père Le Pieu, and boy did he smell. Anti-perspirant, I tell you, it might give you cancer but god above I missed it. ” 

Derek asks him about it late one night, almost a month after the horribly silent car ride back to Beacon Hills. It had been a brutally hot day, late into July, and after the sun was safely down and the rest of the pack scattered, they’d wandered to Derek’s rebuilt porch, collapsed together into the swing Peter had insisted on. By now, they’re both nursing their second beers and Stiles has relaxed, a little, his body listing slowly into Derek’s. 

“You really want to know?” Stiles says. He doesn’t sound like he’s being funny, or like he’s frightened, or like much of anything. He sounds––blank, absent. 

“Please,” says Derek, something in him needing to be gentle. They say the Alphas are supposed cull the weakest members of the pack to keep it strong, but Derek has never been able to do it right, any of it.

Stiles downs the last of his beer, sets the bottle on the porch floor, strips his shirt off and throws it in Derek’s lap in one smooth motion. It would be impressively coordinated if Derek hadn’t grown a little bit used to Stiles’s new grace, the way he cat-foots everywhere he used to stumble.

“I don’t understand,” Derek starts to say, Stiles’s back to him, but then he spots it. There’s a small tattoo at the nape of Stiles’s neck, a mark Derek recognizes in form although not in specifics––a pack sigil, like the one Derek has low on his hip, like the one, in another life, he used to dream about putting on Kate.

“You weren’t going to come back,” Derek breathes, blindsided.

“No,” Stiles agrees. “But then––” He turns around, and Derek can’t stop himself from breathing in audibly: there are five claw marks, deep, spanning from Stiles’s shoulder to his ribs. Stiles is tracing them, softly, with his own long fingers.

“Was this––” Derek starts, but doesn’t know how to finish. 

“His name was Ourson,” Stiles says, looking down at where his hand is still stroking. “We were––I mean––he, he didn’t know what he was doing, when it happened, but I couldn’t stay after.”

Derek makes a guttural, vicious sound in the back of his throat, and reaches out to frame the scar, one hand at each of its terminal ends. “I’ll kill him,” he growls.

Stiles looks at him, a little thinner than he’d been, but almost definitely stronger, like anything extraneous had been razored away. “You won’t,” he says, and as he does Derek knows it to be the truth. “Give me my shirt.”

Derek hadn’t even realized he had the shirt clutched so tightly in his fist, but he hands it over obligingly. Stiles uncrumples it and pokes his finger into one of the holes Derek’s claws had left. 

“Figures,” he sighs, and smiles lopsidedly at Derek. “You owe me a T-shirt.”

“I guess,” Derek says. “Ourson? I’ve heard that name before, somewhere. It means––”

“Sure, you’ve heard of it,” Stiles says. “It means: a pack you don’t fuck with. It means: mind your own business, Derek.”

Derek jerks his hands away. “Yeah, sorry,” he says. “Sorry.”

-

Derek wants to go to him, but––Stiles looks so sharp-edged, so deadly, and Derek is so afraid.


End file.
